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9 amazing ways to learn online

There is no need to buy a massive set of encyclopedias anymore, as you can learn most things online these days. The trouble is that the internet is filled with terrible amounts of misinformation. So, if you are learning online, you are going to have to find a way of avoiding the 99% of lies and find the 1% of truth. You may do that by looking into trusted resources such as the ones listed below.

This is a place where industry experts come and give a speech or a lecture about their specialty. The lectures apply to almost any academic specialty, although it is better known for its business lectures. It is run by a non-profit organization, and its speakers, students not only from high ranking universities, and topics have made very good college essays in the past. You can find them on TED.com or video websites such as Daily Motion and YouTube.

University Lectures

Many universities now offer some kind of distance learning schemes, but there are also groups that have been set up to spread knowledge for free. There are non-profit groups that universities such as MIT and Berkeley work with in order to give away free video lectures. The lectures are given by institutions with the best universities rankings in the country. Websites such as openculture.com have libraries of free university courses. There are even phone apps that are dedicated to being a library resource for these lectures.

This social media network is becoming more and more noisy as it fills with more spam videos and more unskippable advertising, but it does still has its uses, such as the educational programs that it features. The great thing is that you may find educational programs that are not part of an academic course. For example, there are tutorials on how to use the Blender program, where finding tutorials on this elsewhere is near impossible. Do not forget that YouTube is a public access online platform, which means it is going to have its fair share of false information, so keep an eye out and check out their sources before committing!

This is a website set up by two nerds who give lessons on how to program. They use screen capture technology and their own voices to show you how to write program code. They go from the very basics, including on where to download the software you need to start programming. They go right back from programming in C, up to the most recent programming codes. They even have tutorials on how to make your own Smartphone apps. Other great options, like CodeAcademy.com or Bloc.io, are also available to budding web developers!

Free Books Online

If you have an e-reader, then try a few free book sites before you start buying books. There are a lot of free book directories that allow you to save money by legally downloading books for free. There are a few good free ones, but try e-booksdirectory.com and Gutenberg.org to start with.

BBC Learning

The British Broadcasting Corporation features a wide variety of learning resources, with most of them being based on some sort of video format. You may find their educational resources at bbc.co.uk/learning/. You will find educational resources for both younger and older people. It is good because it has resources for adult learners, teachers, children, and even for parents to help them teach their children.

The Discovery Channel

They have an online resource where they give away some of their content for free at dsc.discovery.com. Remember that this is not a non-profit organization, so they are going to charge you for some things, but do have some free resources on their website. Some may say the same for the History Channel website, but in this writer’s opinion, the History Channel can have shaky content. They often have a confirmation bias, and their reporters have trouble with the “absence of evidence” problem (because the content they produce as a result means that they can talk about the effects of ghosts and aliens without any empirical evidence). Always make sure you take into account the hard facts when learning online!

The Rosetta Project

This is available at rosettaproject.org as is an archive and learning center that helps people learn a new language. It is a global collaboration that has set out to teach people a different language for free. It has 1000 languages in archive that helps people learn a new tongue in a community setting.

Google Scholar

This is a tool that you may find at scholar.google.co.uk, and it does have a big library of academic essays that you may read. Its downfall is that it is so hard to find the pieces that you want. Maybe there is a knack to it and it takes some getting used to, but quite often, you will find relevant pieces by accident rather than by design. Still, it offers free academic content so it is hard to complain when most other websites will charge you to look at academic essays. And, the tool will sometimes help you to site a piece of work too.

Kelly Ray is a blogger and contributor, college ranking expert and energetic person. You can find more interesting information here Scholaradvisor.com.

Great article, I learned about some very interesting resources new to me. Pity you left out the Internet Scout (https://scout.wisc.edu/) and the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/). Both contain primary sources in nearly any topic.